Sat 29 May 2010 19.05 EDT
First published on Sat 29 May 2010 19.05 EDT

9 Part Self PortraitChuck Close, 1987collage of large-format Polapan printsEstimate: $50,000-$70,000 Close began using photographs as sketches for painting. The images that emerged from Polaroid’s 20x24in camera convinced him that this was a medium with its own unique expressive possibilities. Larger than most people’s bodies, his head is an object of stupefied wonder: a man confronts the goggle-eyed oddity and absurdity of his own existence

Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California (Winter Sunrise)Ansel Adams, 1944Est: $300,000-$500,000David Hockney once said he couldn’t look at any photograph for more than 30 seconds. This one can be gazed at for as long as it would take you to cross the fields, meander up the foothills, and climb those mountains. American space is different: there is more of it, and heaven is just beyond the horizonPhotograph: Ansel Adams/Courtesy Sotheby's New York

Self-Portrait (Grimace)Andy Warhol, 1979Large-format Polaroid Polacolor printEst: $10,000-$15,000Close’s self-portrait – monumental in size, sculpturally severe in expression – shows off the capacity of Polaroid’s largest camera. Warhol uses a smaller camera to reduce his face to a fuzzy, leering, acne-pocked mask. Close poses for eternity; the vampirish Warhol looks as if he were remembering, with a shudder, what he looked like when alivePhotograph: Andy Warhol/Courtesy Sotheby's New York

Junked Car, Old Lyme, ConnecticutWalker Evans, 1973-4From a Polaroid Type 105 negativeEst: $1,500-$2,500Taken at the end of his life, Evans’s Polaroids brood morbidly over decay. It’s almost a relief, after the tacky consumerist trophies of Rauschenberg and Levinthal, to see nature gobbling up the corroded remnants of culture

North Carolina (from the Bleacher series)Robert Rauschenberg, 1991Large-format Polapan printEst: $20,000-$30,000What do sanitary pads – euphemised here as ‘napkins’ – and a drink made from sassafras have in common? Nothing at all, which is why Rauschenberg combined them, brushing on a coat of kitchen bleach to help them blend. Adams thought of America as one enormous national park; for Rauschenberg it was an overstocked, casually wasteful supermarketPhotograph: Robert Rauschenberg/Courtesy Sotheby's New York

Nude in PumpsHelmut Newton, c.1975Polaroid SX-70 printEst: $5,000-$7,000Polaroids, usually taken by holidaymakers with loved ones as their subjects, have a privileged intimacy. But this is no private memento: it’s a geometrical arrangement of human limbs, and the gloved hand that reaches for the groin is there to contribute to the diagram, not to produce a spasm of solitary pleasurePhotograph: Helmut Newton/Courtesy Sotheby's New York

Ken Moody (with Palm Leaf)Robert Mapplethorpe, c1984Unique large-format Polaroid Polacolor printEst: $5,000-$7,000A wicked specimen of political incorrectness, which explains why Mapplethorpe was disliked by liberals as well as conservatives. A black male body is frankly displayed for delectation, the Polaroid film even giving his skin a sheen of midnight blue. And since spears are not readily available in Greenwich Village, this urban tribesman brandishes a palm frondPhotograph: Robert Mapplethorpe/Courtesy Sotheby's New York

AvalancheWilliam Wegman, 1982Large-format Polacolor printEst: $7,000-$10,000Wegman – who has almost as many prints as Adams in the sale – stages the sublime in his own solemnly jokey way. Adams celebrates nature’s endurance by photographing peaks of granite in Yosemite during snowstorms; Wegman tips a dry shower of flour on to his Weimaraner Man Ray, who is as stoically immobile as any mountainPhotograph: William Wegman/Courtesy Sotheby's New York